Tag: Gop

What if the right gave a culture war and nobody came? Unfortunately, that’s not the case with the latest cultural kerfuffle, manufactured and amplified by GOP gadfly Rush Limbaugh, about contraception generally and the testimony of Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke before Congress more specifically.

The Republicans want to make the presidential race about values, which they define as returning the nation to Victorian morality, laissez faire economics and a heavy dose of conservative Christian theology.

Entirely missing from Foster Friess’ old-timey zinger about how the ladies did the contraception back when he was a lad, other than class, was any sense of male accountability in the procreation process.

Mormonism is not the quintessential “American religion,” to use Tolstoy’s words, just because it got its start in upstate New York. The church has long embodied notions and practices that drive contemporary American capitalism. And those ideas, as author Chris Lehmann demonstrated last October in Harper’s Magazine, remain central to the shaping of national economic policy.

The prolonged Republican primary campaign appears to be taking a toll on independent voters’ faith in Mitt Romney. According to the latest Pew poll, only a minority of independents now describe Romney as “honest and trustworthy” and slightly more than half of independent voters now favor Barack Obama in a race against Romney, who led the president in that category only a month ago. (more)

Criticism of Mitt Romney for lacking a coherent message is grossly unfair. He has been forthright, consistent and even eloquent in pressing home his campaign’s central theme: Mitt Romney desperately wants to be president.

Although an easy answer to the question posed by the headline would appear to be something along the lines of nothing good, there are more subtleties to the issue that merit exploration, and Rick Santorum’s triple win Tuesday doesn’t necessarily add up to an ultimate victory against GOP front-runner Mitt Romney.

If we could see the world with a particularly illuminating set of spectacles, one of its most prominent features at the moment would be a giant carbon bubble, whose bursting someday will make the housing bubble of 2007 look like a lark.

Conservative power ranger Chuck Norris has come out swinging for the GOP once again—this time, he’s willing to lend his unique celebrity brand to give Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign a boost with a memorably worded endorsement only he could compose.

Our civil liberties and First Amendment rights are threatened by the Supreme Court’s decisions in the Julian Assange case; if Mitt Romney’s father was still around, he’d probably endorse Obama; meanwhile, Fox News is ruining the GOP. These discoveries and more after the jump.

Although Mitt Romney owned, in an interview with Nevada journalist Jon Ralston on Thursday, that he “misspoke” the day before in saying he was “not concerned about the very poor,” the presidential candidate might not have much wiggle room amid a speed-fueled news cycle and a chilly Rick Santorum standing watch.

Romney’s decisive victory in Florida came at a price. He aggravated Newt Gingrich’s hostility to him, with all the trouble that could entail, and left behind a dispirited Republican electorate in a state the GOP needs to win this fall.

After Mitt Romney took a beating in South Carolina and his Iowa victory was annulled, his candidacy was beginning to look precarious. But a big win in Florida on Tuesday night put Romney back on course, and now he’s speaking as though the race is nearly over. (more)

When the empire strikes back, it hits hard. The Republican establishment is deploying every weapon and every soldier—even Bob Dole—in an increasingly desperate attempt to pulverize the Newt Gingrich rebellion.

Here’s an algorithm from the Annals of the Obvious: Conservative women commonly identify as values voters, responding to like-minded candidates and campaigns and bringing what are referred to in certain circles as traditional morals into the booths. Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, while purporting to run on a family-friendly platform, has some blots on his personal record that would appear to contradict these ideals.

As Newt Gingrich chugs along on his improbable political comeback track, many have tried to slow his roll, but here comes The New York Times’ Timothy Egan with a scathing Op-Ed, calling the relentless GOP contender a demagogue par excellence while allowing that Gingrich has practiced his uniquely unctuous brand of politics to greasy perfection.

If you heard a loud “gulp” Tuesday night after President Obama’s State of the Union address, it probably came from Republican political strategists as they realized their party’s odds of capturing the White House this fall are getting longer.

“The selection of a Republican candidate for the presidency of this globalized and expansive empire is—and I mean this seriously—the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been,” writes Fidel Castro, who echoes the sentiments expressed by many columnists and commentators spanning the middle to left of our politics.

Sure, there’s the GOP symbol, but the real elephant in the room has been the super PAC, the turbocharged political action committee able to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money on political ads — as long as that spending isn’t coordinated with a particular campaign.

From all evidence, the issue of economic justice isn’t going away. Break the news gently to Mitt Romney, who seems apoplectic that the whole “rich get richer, poor get poorer” thing is being discussed out loud. In front of the children, for goodness’ sake.

Newt Gingrich isn’t giving up his fight for the presidency. The kamikaze candidate has released a new ad attacking Mitt Romney as someone from Massachusetts, the hippie gay rainbow brown people state, or something.